Tad Friend on Harold Ramis

Harold Ramis, the director, actor, and screenwriter behind films such as “Ghostbusters” and “Caddyshack,” died today, at the age of sixty-nine. In 2004, in an essay called “Comedy First,” Tad Friend wrote about Ramis and his films for The New Yorker. Many comedy writers and directors, Friend wrote, feel called to comedy by “a film that spoke to them”:

For Jay Roach, the director of the Austin Powers films, that movie was “Groundhog Day,” in 1993. For Jake Kasdan, the director of “Orange County,” it was “Stripes,” in 1981, and, even more powerfully, “Ghostbusters,” in 1984. For Adam Sandler, it was “Caddyshack,” in 1980. And for Peter Farrelly, who directed “There’s Something About Mary” with his brother Bobby, it was “Animal House,” in 1978.

These comedies have several things in common. They attack the smugness of institutional life, trashing the fraternity system, country clubs, the Army—even local weathermen—with an impish good will that is unmistakably American. Will Rogers would have made films like these, if Will Rogers had lived through Vietnam and Watergate and decided that the only logical course of action was getting wasted or getting laid or—better—both….

Another thing these films have in common is that they were all directed and/or co-written by Harold Ramis. Ramis also acted in “Stripes” and “Ghostbusters” and directed the movies “Vacation” and “Analyze This.” Anyone who saw these films as a teen-ager can probably still quote from one of Ramis’s signature tongue-in-cheek pep talks, which resemble John F. Kennedy’s “Ask Not” speech turned inside out. In “Stripes,” for instance, Bill Murray exhorts his fellow-soldiers by yelling, “We’re not Watusi, we’re not Spartans—we’re Americans! … That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts. Here’s proof.” He touches a soldier’s face. “His nose is cold.”

Ramis was one of the first of the new generation of comic voices to come out of the Second City improv troupe in Chicago, which trained Murray, John Belushi, Chris Farley, and Mike Myers, among many others, in the sketch-driven style that has come to dominate modern comedy. “Sloppiness is a key part of improv,” the screenwriter Dennis Klein told me. “And Harold brought that to Hollywood, rescuing comedies from their smooth, polite perfection.” The secret of American commercial success is to hijack a subculture and ransom it to the mainstream. What Elvis did for rock and Eminem did for rap, Harold Ramis did for attitude: he mass-marketed the sixties to the seventies and eighties. He took his generation’s anger and curiosity and laziness and woolly idealism and gave it a hyper-articulate voice. He wised it up.

“Comedy First” is available to everyone as part of our online archive.

Photograph: Vera Anderson/Getty

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